The release of Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud 3.1 (Cisco IAC) begins to address one of the key questions of our customers who are building public and private clouds: How can I automate the network services configuration in my data center pod to enable policy-based network infrastructure as a service for my customers?

Some of you may be familiar with the Cisco Network Services Manager (Cisco NSM), part of the Intelligent Automation software portfolio. With the release of Cisco IAC 3.1, Cisco NSM is now integrated with and bundled as part of Cisco IAC, laying the foundation for infrastructure as a service.

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud 3.1 was announced this week in a blog article by Director of Marketing Jason Schroedl.

Why are Customers and Partners excited about this new release?

The release this week of Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud 3.1 further demonstrates Cisco’s commitment to help its enterprise and service provider customers with innovative technology for private, public, and hybrid cloud deployments.

Today I would like to talk about the three ways an enterprise company can implement their cloud with Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud:

Just the other morning, my 3.5 year old daughter said “Daddy, can you make me a waffle?” And like any self-respecting parent, I of course responded with “Poof. You’re a waffle.”

It reminded me of something we frequently hear from customers: they effectively ask us to “make my data center a cloud.” Now we could wave our arms and say “Poof. It’s a cloud.” But it’s not that easy. Despite what some cloudwashers may say, virtualizing your data center does not mean you have a cloud – and self-service provisioning of VMs is not cloud computing. Real clouds require much more.

Fortunately, we have solutions to help our customers deploy real clouds – with market-leading compute, network, and management products in our Unified Data Center portfolio as well as our cloud enablement services. In fact, today we introduced yet another innovation in our Unified Computing System (UCS) portfolio with Cisco UCS Central.

I’m pleased to also announce the latest release of our cloud management software solution today: Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud version 3.1. This release introduces several exciting new features, and I’ve highlighted a few of these new product capabilities below.

Virtual Data Centers – In simple infrastructure-as-a-service use cases, virtual machines and other resources may be provisioned from a shared pool of resources on-demand. In more advanced infrastructure-as-a-service use cases, virtual data centers (VDCs) can be established to provide project teams or departments with a dedicated resource pool of compute, storage, and network capacity for their own organization. I’ve written in the past about this concept of a virtual data center and this is what Cisco IT deployed for our own internal private cloud.

As a quick reminder , to participate to this 6 weeks challenge and have a chance to win every week a new iPAD , you want to visit our Facebook page. The questions are submitted on Sunday midnight PST, and answers have to be provided not later than Friday 12:00PM PST. Participation is easy and fun and allow you to collect points to compete for the highest IQ score. This best Unified Data Center “brain” will be the winner of the Grand Prize (valued US $2000). Every week-end (Friday noon to Sunday) you can answer bonus questions, which give you additional points to catch up for the Grand Prize.

The winner of week 2 (questions about Cisco Open Networking Environment) was Mohamed Fawzy Saleh from Egypt who won a new iPAD. Mohamed is a student, very passionate by network technologies . Congratulations Mohamed!

From my point of view , one of the best quality of the high tech population is the thirst to keep learning in a fast changing and demanding environment . One of the intention of this challenge (game?) is to suggest every week questions to stimulate your curiosity.

My ask this week for you as we are moving to the next bonus questions for this weekend (Security – See below) and week 4 (Virtualization) of the challenge is to tell us what you think about the set of questions. Did you learn? Did you find the questions interesting ? Just as a reminder, and for the new participants, here are the topics we covered so far.

This morning the winner of our first weekly raffle was picked amongst the 200 correct answers! This lucky and smart participant will receive very soon a congratulations e-mail and in a few days his/her Apple iPad!

The race for the grand prize is definitely on! But don’t worry !

If you didn’t participate this week , you can still win points in answering the bonus questions before the end of the week-end ! How ? very simple
Check right away www.Facebook.com/ciscodc for the Unified data center IQ tab – This set of questions are worth 30 points – A great way to catch up if you missed this first week or to boost your Unified IQ if you are already in the race .

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